The Maine Conspiracy

 by Dr. Aaron and Marie Greenwald   (452 pages paperback)

The Maine Conspiracy:

 How a state colluded and abused its power to prevent low cost Healthcare

Chapter I

I was asleep and felt someone shake me. I opened my eyes slowly, looking up at a window. It was dark outside.

I reached for my watch. Nothing. I reached for my wife. No one.  I got on the breakfast line that had formed. No washing. No brushing teeth.

Breakfast was pasty oatmeal, two slices of tasteless white bread and two hockey pucks. That's what the guys call them: Two round burnt brown, type of sausages. Add a half pint of milk with a small packet of apple jelly.

The back of my yellow, cotton duck jumpsuit, worn 24 hours a day, told me in black letters: Orange County Jail. On the right pants leg, in equally faded black letters, it announced my status: Inmate.

Two days before, April 5, 1999, I was comfortably doing root canal therapy in Manhattan, followed by dinner at the Friars. Today I’m doing time in Goshen. Not the biblical town of Judea. This Goshen, the capital of Orange County, New York, home of the Orange County Correctional Facility, is a far cry from midtown Manhattan. It may be only 70 miles, but for me the trip took a lifetime.

     What a way to end the century. What a way to begin a new one. As the lights went out that night at 11, I wondered what had I done to put me in jail?

     It began on a Tuesday in February, 1972, on the 28th floor of 501 Madison Avenue in Manhattan. One of my celebrity patients, Paramount Pictures President Frank Yablans, sat in the dental chair. The radio played "King of the Road." I sang along as I cemented a ten-unit bridge into Mr. Yablans' mouth. "Trailer for sale or rent, rooms to let fifty cents...da da da dada da...midnight train...destination Bangor, Maine."

     "Yup, Frank, that's where I'm headed. Bangor, Maine."  

     "Are you crazy?" Yablans blurted out. "Bangor, Maine? What the hell's in Bangor? Moose? Portland, I can see. Maybe. Bangor? Never." 

     "Open wide."

     "Augh...augh"

     "Open." I put a biting stick between the newly placed bridge and his opposing teeth. "Now, Frank, bite down on this; hard." 

     A supposedly sophisticated, city wise, forty-five-year old intended to pack up and head for the wilds of Maine. Why? Why would a successful Madison Avenue dentist suddenly sell his profitable practice that took 14 years of intense effort to build, and move to Bangor? Why give up all he had striven for and enjoyed? And why Maine? Would a painful, rancorous divorce do it? Would not being able to see my two sons, eight and thirteen, do it? Would previously steady-as-a-rock hands, now shaking so badly I had to hold my right hand with my left to steady it while treating patients, do it? My jitters resulted from the trauma of a never-ending divorce involving two young children. Put everything together and it spelled moving day for me. The sooner the better. With a rare exhibit of good luck, I found two dentists who wanted my practice, were willing to pay my asking price and, more important, wanted me out of the office, ASAP.

     Why Bangor? Why Maine? My friend Joe Unobskey had continually invited me to Maine. When Lenore and I divorced, he badgered me to move there. "Aaron, get out of New York. Move here. Enjoy the simple life. Get away from the crime, the dirt, the rat race. And that dog shit. Ya can't walk in New York City with your head up. Breathe clean, fresh, Maine air for a change; walk with your head held high. Learn to relax and enjoy life." What did he know? He only came to New York two or three times a year, on buying trips for his ladies ready-to-wear store. And he took cabs.

     Joe, and his wife, Marylou, convinced me Maine would be the perfect place to start life anew. It began that way. The way Joe said it would.   

     I ran from my marriage to Lenore Janis Greenwald, who quickly dropped the Greenwald. It lasted twelve years with two sons, Peter and John, and an overload of acrimony and bitterness. A trial separation soon followed by a corrosive divorce; and then came a ski trip that changed my life, when I met Marie.

     Born in 1927, on a Friday the thirteenth, as a mid 40 year old I never looked my age. My dark brown, curly hair was so thick the barber continually thinned it with those scissors that resembled pinking shears. I didn't have a cavity until age twenty-two, while taking my masters degree in physiology at The Ohio State University in Columbus. My new wife, Marie, jokingly reminded me, what did I know about toothaches? I never had one. What did I know about root canals? I never had those either. I kept in good shape, not with weights or strenuous exercise, but sports such as skiing and tennis. And walking. And my mental, non-strenuous, exercise: reading and model building.

      I grew up in the Bronx during the Great Depression of the 1930s. My dad, Martin, struggled as a salesman in the men’s clothing business, while my mother, Florence, peddled ladies blouses door to door during the day and worked as a practical nurse at the Hospital for Joint Diseases on the 3 -11 p.m. shift. They toiled hard to provide my nine-year-older brother, Robert, and me, with whatever amenities they could afford. We never lacked the necessities, but neither did we enjoy any luxuries promised with the great American dream.

      With the approaching war in Europe and improvement in the general economy, life for the Greenwalds also improved. College for older brother Bob and me became a reality. The lessons learned from this maturing experience were that success was built on hard work, a good college education, and a profession rather than a business career. "You're not going into business and have to struggle like your pop,” my mother said. No Willy Loman for her son.

      Something else I learned from my mom: independence and self-reliance. When I was six years old, a 1933 Buick sedan hit me. That car must have weighed two tons. It had thick, yellow, wooden spoked wheels with white sidewall tires and two extra wheels mounted on the front fenders. It belonged to the father of my best friend, who lived up the block from the apartment house in which we lived. I was playing a ball game called "points." You throw the ball against the wall and catch it on the rebound, one point for catching it with one bounce, two for no bounces. I had my left leg on the sidewalk and my right on the street.

      The car caught my right leg and threw me around it. I blacked out and remembered nothing until the next day. By the time my mom reached the Emergency Room at Fordham Hospital, across from the Bronx Zoo, the sheet was over my head and a priest giving me last rites. There were no rabbis in city hospitals during the nineteen thirties. Today, there's no Fordham Hospital.

     My mother pleaded with the interns to try to revive me, and one did, after a while.

      It was sixteen hours before I regained consciousness. It took the street cleaner more than an hour to clean up the blood lost. Yes, before and during the depression, New York City streets were cleaned by a Department of Sanitation man in a white uniform and cap, with a large broom, shovel, and a barrel on two wheels.

      After the fractured right fibula was set I wore a heavy plaster cast on my leg for months. The brain concussion and fractured skull healed without a cast. The independence I learned came soon after. No crutches or cane for me. My mom's character building words stayed with me to this day. "You'll have to crawl until you can get up and walk on your own."

     The accepted medical theory of that time said liver, rich in red blood cells, would help replenish my body's lost supply. For years afterward, I took daily doses of liver extract and actually learned to love eating calf and beef liver. 

     To aid the brain in recuperation, I lived on phenobarbital. Again, accepted medical practice of that time involved prescribing barbiturates to control petit and grand mal seizures, of which I suffered the former.

     The Great Depression did not except the Greenwald family. I was too young to understand, or too protected by my parents, to learn how much it affected us. In 1936, I had another life threatening experience, this time an infected right mastoid bone. That bone is directly behind the outer ear. Today, Penicillin cures such an infection, but in 1936, before antibiotics, the only treatment was surgery. Because my mom served on the staff of Beth Israel Hospital, she had access to many surgeons, and convinced an internationally famous otorhinolarynologist to try his luck and skill on my, by then, potentially deadly infection. Knowing my mother, she likely convinced Dr. Hurd to operate for a discounted fee, and be paid in installments. Four-feet-nine and under 100 pounds, my mother wielded the force and personality of a Napoleon. I always thought Hurd an apt name for a surgeon who operates on ears.

     In 1938 my mom took me to Dr. Norman Vincent Peale to see if the brain concussion from the auto accident had loosened any screws in my head. And tighten them if it had. I learned from Dr. Peale his world famous dictum of the art of positive thinking. Positive thinking became my middle name and self-confidence something I became loaded with.

     Being Jewish, from the Bronx, and having a mother in the healthcare profession, it seemed almost preordained that I’d become a doctor. To escape this fate took more fortitude than I possessed. Besides, I liked the idea of being called doctor rather than merely mister. If I’m to be a doctor, it had to be one who didn't deal with much blood. I’d more than my share of that red stuff. With my exceptional motor skills, developed by building models, dentistry held great hopes for me, since surgery was definitely out.

     I had a strong desire to save teeth rather than pull them. All that talent, skill and time spent on building model airplanes, ships, and trains would now be put to better use at saving decayed, infected, hurting teeth. Do not, for one moment, think me some New York goodie-two-shoes. I belonged to the dental societies and lectured both here and abroad to other dentists on what I knew best and was good at in dentistry. I gave dental care talks to inner city kids in Harlem public schools. No preacher, I merely thought I should do my share: more my background and family than me.

     "Aaron, always try to give more than you take. It's not charity; it's your duty; a mitzvah." My mother's words rang forever in my mind.

     In dentistry, as in medicine, there is much more to learn after you receive that stuggled for and coveted degree. Following an internship at Jewish Memorial Hospital in Manhattan, I worked for the Children’s Aid Society in depressed areas of New York City treating poor children. I wanted as much experience as possible before starting my own practice.

     That began in a professional building at 30 Central Park South. When a teenager, my mother had brought me many times to a dermatologist in that building to treat what most teenagers suffer from: pimples on the face. Being a lower middle class Jewish kid from the Bronx, I dreamed of one day living or working on that famous nouveau riche street. The aura of Central Park South and that building, being just a few doors from the world famous Plaza Hotel and opposite beautiful Central Park, provided the stimuli for many dreams. My first dream became reality when I rented a room from another dentist for one day a week, and later, as the practice grew for two and three days. Finally, on to my very own office, on Madison Avenue.

     At dental school, Dean Nagle had said, “When you graduate all you have to do is hang up your shingle, take good care of your patients, and the world will beat a path to your door."

     What did he know? He never had to meet a payroll. The world didn’t beat a path to any dentist's door in those years. You had to go out and schmooze them or drag them in.

     I became a joiner, not only to socialize, but for business. Friends and acquaintances were a major source of new patients. In the late 1950s, with no dental advertising, insurance or health plans, building a private practice in Manhattan took effort and socializing.  

     As a former Boy Scout, I joined a local scout troop as assistant scoutmaster. One of my patients, Jimmy Durante, suggested I join the New York Friars Club, and proposed me for membership. The Friars became a great source of show business referrals.

     With passing time, my marriage to Lenore soured. We grew apart instead of closer. She followed her interest in the theater and was rarely home. I ended up building ship models. Our marriage left nothing but our two sons, a housekeeper and a decorator furnished apartment. Soon after the divorce, Joe Unobskey convinced me to move to Maine. And then came Marie. 

     I met Marie on a Sunday night on December 5, 1971, on a twenty-minute Northeast Airlines flight from Portland, Maine, to Boston. I had taken my young son, John, on a ski trip to Sugarloaf USA in Carrabasset Valley, Maine, and was returning to New York City, where I had taken a one-bedroom apartment after I left Lenore. It was the last time I’d be allowed to see John or his older brother, Peter.

     We took our seats. Then she came down the aisle. Not my preconceived image of a stewardess. Tall, about five foot seven. She tied her auburn hair back in what she laughingly called a George Washington colonial style, ponytail. She approached our seats. Our eyes met for an instant. She smiled. I smiled back.

     Was she a mirage or manna from heaven? As soon as the seat belt sign went off, I went aft to find out.

     I found her in the rear of the plane, sitting and writing.

     "Hi. Mind if I sit down?"

     She looked up with her large, beautiful and very dark brown eyes, and smiled, so I said hello to Marie Lawson, in her late twenties, amply endowed and with a built in British accent. When I heard her voice, I heard the voice of an angel. I was smitten.

     She was not, and lived in Lynn, Massachusetts: a Boston suburb. I’d found a Venus de Milo with arms, who spoke as beautifully as she looked, but lived 250 miles away. Our conversation progressed to "Why not call me when you're in the city? Maybe we could get together, have dinner. Let me give you my phone number." I wrote my name and phone number on a piece of the flight ticket folder and gave it to her, as she ushered me to my seat when the seat belt sign went on, announcing the approach to Logan Airport. "Really, give me a call when you're in the city. I'd like to see you again."

     The way she took that piece of paper and put it in her handbag told me this wasn’t instant electricity but a short circuit. Her bag was one of those huge airline handbags, about the size of an overnighter and as heavy, probably issued by the airline's strength conditioning coach, and jammed with whatever detritus women cram into them. Like names and phone numbers of forgotten, loser-type passengers...

     I didn't want to be forgotten and thrown away. "Call me, okay?"

     After a week, I called. Told her I'd gotten her name from her nameplate, remembered she lived in Lynn, and dialed Information. We talked for almost half an hour about many topics avid readers of Newsweek and The New York Times could converse on. I didn't ask for a date, but a week later, called again. Another half-hour, or more, of dilettante conversation. Still didn’t ask for a date. Ten days later called again. This time I asked for a date. I was coming from Bangor, Maine, after investigating the possibilities of starting an endodontic dental practice, and casually suggested we meet for dinner before I went on to New York. She accepted.

     It was the day after Christmas. What better way to celebrate than dinner at the China Sails, a family style Chinese restaurant in Marblehead, a north shore suburb of Boston? It became one of our favorites as the romance went on for 26 weekends. On her 28th birthday, May 20, 1972, I finally convinced Marie Lawson to accept my marriage proposal. I gave her an emerald engagement ring and threw a party in my apartment for all my friends. Marie had none in New York. A combination Marie's birthday, our engagement, and me moving to Bangor. 

     The well wishing partygoers had their classic comments: "Big mistake, Aaron." "Don't give up this great apartment, 'cause you'll be back before you know it." "Bangor, Maine? Nothing there but moose." "Greenwald leave New York? Are you kidding?" "You can take the boy out of the city, but you can't take the city out of the boy." My standard reply: "Hell, I'll give it my best. We'll make it work."

     The following day the movers packed my belongings into their van and, waving goodbye to whoever stood on 53rd Street and First Avenue, I jumped into my dad’s 1968 Plymouth Valiant, loaded with beautiful ship models I’d painstakingly made and wouldn't trust to the Mayflower movers, and headed north, up Interstate 95.

     Settling in Bangor had become a reality a few weeks before, when I leased a two-bedroom apartment in one of the nicer complexes on Union Street, called Longrale Park. At the same time, I signed a lease with Dr. William Deighan for space in his still unfinished professional building on Bower Street. What I rented was a shell to be completed by me with the excellent professional advice of George Lloyd, Dr. Deighan's, and soon to be my, architect.

        I had in mind to ski and sail, above and beyond earning a living in dentistry. Working my way through dental school as a waiter in the Lobster Box Restaurant, at the tip of City Island, in the Bronx, on Long Island Sound, I watched, with envy, the sailboats in the distance. For me, at that time, the distance seemed beyond closing. The move to Maine brought it tantalizingly close. Before leaving New York, I bought a 1954 Rhodes fiberglass, 18-foot, day sailer for $1,000 fully equipped with four sails and a 2.5 hp British Seagull outboard motor. It even came with a trailer, which I hitched to my Dad’s car and drove, expectantly, to Maine.

     With a black belt in root canal therapy, I set up in Bangor as the state's only dentist, north of Portland, limited to endodontics. That is more commonly known by the three-word epithet, root canal therapy, the three words that bring terror to every dental patient's heart and are the butt of many comedians’ jokes.

     The extraordinary romance between Marie and me continued with a marriage performed by the town clerk of Bangor, on August 31, 1972, followed five days later by a romantic outdoor reception on the grounds of my cousin’s home in Swampscott, Mass. We had a green and white striped tent, a caterer and photographer. We also hired two twenty-something musicians, one playing the viola and the other, a guitar. They played Elizabethan baroque music.

      After settling in Bangor in the fall of 1972, following a wonderful three-week honeymoon in Egypt, Israel and Greece, I traveled from Augusta, north, east and west throughout Maine and into New Brunswick, Canada. No pleasure trip this time. I went from dentist to dentist, introducing myself, and handing out business cards with a map to my new office. That's what you do when you're starting a referral-type practice. You "go make nice" to a varied group of strangers who, in this state, never before saw an endodontist and didn't trust out-of-staters, especially New Yorkers.

     After the honeymoon, Marie continued working at Northeast Airlines, which had merged with Delta, and she lost some of her seniority. Based in Boston she had to ferry from Bangor to work at Logan International Airport. We were apart more than together. With Marie away, I made friends with a neighbor, attorney Marshall Stern, who lived in one of the buildings in our apartment complex.

     The local dental Society invited me to join. In dentistry, if you are a member of the American Dental Association, you're automatically a member of the state society and any local component group. As the first and only dentist north of Portland to limit to endodontics, they invited me to lecture on root canal therapy at the local society’s meetings.

     The annual Penobscot Valley Dental Society Christmas parties were held at Pilots Grill, a Bangor restaurant. Marie and I were invited, our chance to introduce ourselves to local dentists and their wives. Here dental parties differed from social get-togethers in New York or Boston. Here existed gender separation, a phenomenon I hadn’t observed since a freshman at then Methodist Syracuse University, where in 1945, Archbold Stadium was sex segregated.

     Marie walked over to a group of women, introduced herself and started to make pleasant small talk. She enjoyed meeting people; in her job she met people from around the world and felt comfortable talking to anyone. The women, all wives of dentists, smiled politely, spoke briefly, and then one by one excused themselves.

    She tried talking with a group of men, who reacted similarly. Two women and a man stood at the bar, drinks in hand, conversing. Marie walked over and introduced herself. Again, pleasant in the beginning, the women soon backed off, as though she had bad breath. The man quickly followed. Marie, left standing alone, conversed with the bartender while watched by a group standing near. I’d been talking with Dr. Irving Paul, orthodontist and fellow NYU graduate, and his wife, Sue. When I introduced Marie to the Pauls, she sensed good feelings, a most welcome change.

     When Marie and I returned to the apartment, we talked about the cool reception at the party, especially hers.

     "It's obvious to me why they seemed unfriendly," I said. You wore that long, fitted, red dress, bare at the shoulders. With your hair swept up, you looked gorgeous."

     "Oh c’mon, that’s ridiculous.”

     "Not only that. You're twenty-eight. Most of those wives are over forty. Your beauty intimidated them. Some women lack self-confidence and when they see someone like you, with your warmth and friendliness, and glowing personality, especially in that dress, you scared them. And the men were probably afraid their wives were watching them watch you."

     "Me, intimidating? That's ridiculous."

     "I saw how those guys looked at you. Even Irv Paul."

     "Were you jealous?"

     "I sure was."

     The practice slowly grew. Marie continued to fly, commuting out of Boston. On her days off, we took trips to New York for the opera, to Boston to visit with friends, to New Orleans for sightseeing, to Florida for sunbathing and back to Maine for skiing at Sugarloaf. After Marie had been away for several days, we'd share a quiet, intimate evening at home.

    My Dad had died in 1971, and we decided after a year or more to move mom and her parrot, Chiquita, from Greenwich, Connecticut, to Bangor, where we could keep a close watch on them. She’d been sliding into cranial arteriosclerosis and experiencing difficulty living alone. Today she would be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Mom, once strong and stimulating, became weak and withering. For 56 years of her marriage, with one exception during the Great Depression, she had never been without her husband, Martin, by her side. My older brother, Bob, lived closer, but emotionally couldn’t care for her properly. We rented a one-bedroom apartment for her, and bought her a small Boston terrier. Mom named him Corky.

     Unfortunately, by the spring of 1973, Mom had slid further down an emotional and physical slope and could not care for herself, Corky, Chiquita and her apartment. We gave the pets away and moved her to the Bangor House, at the time a grand old hotel that had bedded other stalwarts: Daniel Webster, Ulysses Grant, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, and many others.

     Many exquisite examples of Victorian architecture exist in Bangor. During the middle and late eighteen hundreds, Bangor distinguished itself by shipping more lumber in vessels on high tide water than any other place in the world. With all the shipping, lumbering, sawmills and ship building industries prospering, numerous fortunes were made. Mansions were built to house and show off the newly made wealth.

     Wherever I’ve seen a State Street in an American city, it is usually lined with stately houses, many now in varying degrees of decaying despair or converted to apartments, funeral homes or professional offices. Bangor was no exception. But Bangor also had a Broadway and a West Broadway. Broadway ran at right angles to State Street in the heart of what you would call downtown.

     On Broadway the lumber and shipbuilding barons built their monuments to family and posterity. By the 1880s, they ran out of sites, and the newer nouveau riche industrialists moved up Union Street from State, on the opposite side of town, and opened a new street, called West Broadway. This associated them with the older wealth of Broadway on the East side, yet gave them a panache and street of their own for their larger and more prestigious mansions on the west side of town.

     By April 1973, the Greenwalds, being nouveau, but not riche, bought a beautiful old sea captain's home on Union Street and started to renovate. Built in 1870, and the only home in Bangor with a stained multicolored glass window in the shape of the six-pointed Star of David. It stood two streets away from West Broadway, now home to late twentieth century wealth such as the Warren families, publishers of The Bangor Daily News, and soon to be home to the King family. Not the sisters singing group of the 1940s and ‘50s, but Stephen, the horror story author of today.

     We felt we belonged. The first year in the apartment at Longrale could be called a trial period. With a home -- committed, putting down roots, where in our garden on many a hot day we dug up weeds and dodged the omnipresent black flies. Now that I think of it, with Claritin clear hindsight, those damned black flies were harbingers of what was yet to come.

     This, our first home, we doted on it as any new parents would on their first-born. We poured all our efforts, much of our hopes and most of our money into it. And, like the bottomless pit that old houses are, it soaked up whatever we poured into it and constantly craved more.

          Soon after starting our redecorating and rehabilitation project on the old house, Marie announced, in September of 1973, her pregnancy. After three months, she took a maternity leave from Delta.

     In our first year of marriage and Maine, Marie came home only on weekends. She still flew for Delta. I worked on building my practice. The difference between practicing on Madison Avenue and Bangor, Maine: 100 years of cultural and social lag. I had free time to visit other dentists and investigate the dental situation throughout much of the state, and Bangor, in particular.

     Many Maine adults could not afford proper dental care and statistics then proved Maine had one of the poorest health records in the nation. Bangor had no dental clinic in either of its two major hospitals to provide for indigent adults. I refused to accept that. It had a clinic for children, up to age 14, run by the city and capably staffed. Adults, however, were out in the cold, and in Maine that could be detrimental to your health.

     After researching the state, I found one facility for only emergency extractions in Maine’s biggest city, Portland. Where did Portland’s indigent adults go for other treatment? Nowhere. Where did those far from Portland go for dental treatment? Out to the barn with a pair of pliers and a bottle of whiskey.

     Looking back, I see a pattern emerging that may have caused local dentists to think they had a growing problem with me. How else to explain what happened? The pattern of an annual parade of what must have been perceived as Greenwald's bizarre and foolish ideas, my so-called brainstorms to raise the dental IQ of the public. Selfish? Maybe.

      But I didn't want to be associated with a state that ranked last in dental care. I wanted to improve the local community, wherein a study conducted a few years before we arrived, found 50% of welfare recipients surveyed were totally edentulous -- without natural teeth. Maybe it was snobbishness on my part: the Rudyard Kipling syndrome. Picking up the White Man's Burden. Maybe I should have conducted my own survey of Maine dentists to find out how many were willing to accept change. Maybe I shouldn't have pushed so hard to change. Maybe….

     But I did push. I organized the Bangor Adult Dental Clinic, first securing an IRS, non-taxable, charity exemption. Then I persuaded St. Joseph Hospital in Bangor to donate the two fully equipped treatment rooms the Air Force had left behind when they abandoned Dow Air Force Base and sold it to the city for one dollar. I met with the hospital director, Sister Mary Norberta of the Felician Sisters, and with the medical director.

     "Sister, think of it, St. Joseph's will be the first in the state to provide complete dental treatment for indigent adults. We know there are plenty of them to keep our proposed dental department busy."

     Sister Norberta liked the idea. "Doctor Greenwald, if you can organize this properly and get the cooperation of the local dentists to staff it, we will provide the space, rent free, and a dental assistant for you to train."

     Marie and I got busy. I induced nationwide dental manufacturers and suppliers to donate supplies and equipment. Marie always liked getting involved in underdog activities, from baby harp seals to the hard strapped. "Aaron, a raffle is always a good money raiser."

     "Sure, but what do we offer as a prize?" 

     More creative than I, she said, "I'll talk to Sprague Oil and see if they'll donate a two hundred seventy-five gallon tank load of home fuel oil." She did, and so did Sprague. The raffle raised over $300. We also cajoled local businesses to supply whatever extra funding was necessary. No government subsidies, strictly a community based, self-help program.

     The biggest hurdle: convincing local dentists to volunteer their time. "Are you kidding? Give my time, free? Hell, no. Time is money."

     "Look, the public sees us as money grubbing tooth pullers. This is a great opportunity to change that image. All you have to do is give one three hour morning or afternoon a month."

     After I convinced one or two old timers, who had free time, more dentists fell into line. The media played it up: the first adult dental clinic in the state opened in October, 1973. With positive publicity and photos in all the Maine newspapers, the remainder of the dental community accepted and reluctantly participated. A woman was trained as clinic administrator. Initially there were no charges, other than laboratory fees for prosthetic services such as dentures and crowns. After a few years, however, minimal fees were instituted as it became apparent that an equity position, on the part of patients, no matter how small, sustained their commitment to consistent and proper care.

     The success of the adult dental clinic went to my head. My sole concern involved improving the dental health of the community. The next year I suggested a contest for children to involve them in better dental health. Next, a newspaper column on dental health also met with skepticism. Next a TV program on medical and dental health. The local society voted this idea down. My colleagues perceived me as either wave-maker or show-boater, both species looked down upon by conservative Yankees.

     Many Mainers are known as Mainiacs, perhaps because of the incest and inbreeding. Merely open a phone book for any Maine city or community and check the last names. Every area in the United States has a group of certain names endemic to that area. These are the post-Columbian natives: Europeans, not Indians. Maine has a preponderance of those names. They are usually all related.

     Maybe it's all that alcohol and nicotine. Maine led the nation in the number of alcoholics per capita. It also led in nicotine dependence in states north of the tobacco-growing belt. The extreme cold and extra long winters make "cabin fever" a dreaded and almost incurable disease. Two of its major side effects are incest and suicide.

     Mainers, like most New England Yankees, dislike out-of-staters, especially those who suggest how to do things. Even more, they dislike change. Talking change to them resembled telling a dog that meat is no good for it. What's been good for them the past few hundred years is good enough now. 

     My practice and family grew. David, named after Marie's deceased dad, was born in 1974. Martin, named after my dead dad, arrived in 1976.  Marie kept busy bringing up the boys. During the day I did more root canals, and evenings renewed my childhood dream and hobby; building a model railroad layout.

     In early 1978, when three new general dentists appeared on the local scene, with no matching discernible increase in the general population, it resulted in more dentists seeing fewer patients. The patient pie remained the same size but each dentist's slice got smaller and less palatable. Rather than advertise, an idea they vehemently opposed, the dentists merely tightened their belts. With more gaps in their schedules and more spare time on their hands, the general dentists now did the procedures they previously referred to those who limited their practices -- specialists such as me. Less root canals for me meant more extra time. Time to worry. Time to think. Time to read.

     At this time Marie and I decided to build an addition to our house and move my endodontic office there. Why continue to pay Dr. Deighan $400 a month rent when business slowed? Who knew how soon it would improve?

     One Sunday, an ad in Parade magazine supplement of The Bangor Daily News caught my eye and attention.

     "Marie, look at this."

     You've seen those full-page ads. They show a dynamic looking young man, standing next to his Rolls Royce or Mercedes, with a mansion in the background. They promise fortunes to be made in real estate with no money of your own. The ad even had a money back guarantee.

     "I don't know, Aaron. These ads that promise so much for so little worry me." Marie, the forever conservative, British skeptic. She had to be, to tone down her overly enthusiastic American husband.

     "What have I got to lose? Nineteen ninety five?"

     "Instead of getting involved in real estate, which you know nothing about, stick with dentistry, which you know lots about. Take your brother's advice. Open an advertised dental practice."  

     "Marie, you don't see ads of dentists with Rolls Royces, standing beside their mansions."

     I sent away for "How to Wake Up the Financial Genius Inside You," by Mark Haroldsen. Why not put my talents and experience as a carpenter's assistant, when in graduate school at Ohio State, to new, more profitable work? How foolish not to add the name Greenwald to that long list of real estate entrepreneurs who made it big.  I now had the spare time. Why not?

     Using Haroldsen's ideas, I bought a house with the bank's money. Not hewing close to his lines, I did major renovations. With a more valued asset I was off to the bank to re-mortgage. Another one of Haroldsen's ideas: buy as much property as you can, make inexpensive improvements, collect raised rents and watch them appreciate in value. Then laugh all the way to the bank.

     I bought other houses. My first shock: there is a big difference between inexpensive cosmetic improvements, as recommended by Haroldsen, and costly overhauls or rehabilitations as done by Greenwald. I went overboard. As each apartment became vacant I renovated it. I made silk purses out of sows’ ears. The tenants loved their new apartments. Why not? Haroldsen himself would have moved in and happily parked his Rolls out front.

     In one of the houses, I inherited two pot smoking, longhaired, 20-something tenants. Lloyd Bishop and Bruce McKenzie worked as carpenters’ assistants on the construction of the Koala Inn on the Odlin Road in Bangor. Bishop, about five foot eight, had a dark sallow complexion and jet-black hair combed straight back. In the ‘90s it would be tied in a ponytail.

     McKenzie, about six feet tall and thinner than his pal, with more disheveled, long and stringy, light brown hair, usually kept a cigarette behind his left ear. His eyes always appeared red, inflamed. The poster boy for Visine. He and Bishop dressed in Bangor's blue-collar uniform: torn jeans and worn plaid flannel shirts. If they had a pickup truck, it would have a gun rack on the rear window with a shotgun and carpenter's level, clipped on.

     What most intrigued me about Bishop and McKenzie was their taste in furniture and interior decoration. Who would think aspiring carpenters, high school dropouts, would express an interest in early American antiques? A red and white parachute draped from the ceiling of their living room caught my eye. Very Arabesque, creative, and inconsistent with their demeanor and other less worldly surroundings -- such as a Radio Shack stereo and a Sears ten speed bike.

     "Maybe you guys would like to work for me and rehab the apartments as they become available? No salary. We'll trade labor for rent."

     Both saw the beauty of the offer. "Sure, Doc. Whadya have in mind?" They were about to lose their jobs at the Koala Inn, the project close to completion. Bishop offered more help. "My dad is a great carpenter. He could supervise us for a few dollars more. Cash."

     "No problem. Ask your dad to call and we'll get going as soon as you guys are ready."

     On my way to emulate author Haroldsen's ideas and at last awaken the financial genius inside me, I had visions of our mansion with a shiny new Rolls in the driveway. Look out, Donald Trump.